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Women have a very strong revealed preference for valuing motherhood above almost anything else, for the simple reason that women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again. I haven't seen much address of this point from your side of the debate, and there's lots of corroborating minor pieces of evidence- mothers overwhelmingly make large career sacrifices to prioritize motherhood, even when they could choose not to, for example.
You're also ignoring the reality of conscription specifically, which is that nobody wants to be there. It's entirely reasonable to say to the young women when the men are being drafted 'yeah, they don't want to be in the army, suck it up just like they have to'.
I don't think this is a great argument because the marginal cost of additional children when you already have one is comparatively tiny. Your first kid is an enormous commitment, demanding a massive amount of time, energy, and money. Hell, before you even get started you need to find a suitable partner, which can be hard enough on its own. But if you've already got a toddler, what's one more? You can dress them in hand-me-downs and you were going to stay home to watch the other one anyway. It means another year or two of supporting kids on the backend, but that's a long time from now, and late adolescents aren't that hard to support regardless. The additional costs aren't zero, obviously, but they're much smaller.
So even if additional kids are worthwhile, that doesn't prove that the first was. Fortunately, we don't have to wonder: The natural revealed preference argument for how much women value motherhood is the rate of motherhood. Which is decreasing.
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Women prefer to have more kids when they are mothers and single women do posit married life as an idealized outcome, but women are pretty shit at playing the dating game as young stupid adults because the typical dating pool there is other young stupid adults.
Frankly, the idea that motherhood is necessary for the continuation of the state is a modern concept that strikes me as a loose end looking for a connection. There has never been a state that died out as a result of female population collapse because a surplus of males just means the males invade another land and take those females for themselves, like what Arabs and Africans are doing to Europe. Europe will survive and even thrive (demographically though certainly not politically) in future because the women will be forced into a natalist patriarchy, or they will be replaced by homeland imports that do accede to the natalist patriarchy. At this point the local women may wish they were in fact conscripted so that they can fight back against their fate, but of course without help from any icky men who may themselves be Potentially Right Wing.
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The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.
More seriously, my assumption here is that there's a kind of… not sunk cost fallacy, exactly, but "at this point"-ism to it. Once you've had one child, that's it, you are A Parent, you're going to have that dangling responsibility for the rest of your life come hell or high water. So you may as well make the most of it and keep on in that direction; trying to suddenly about-face to a high-flying career in rocket science would bring only the disappointment of never making it as big as if you'd jumped straight in without having a kid first, while with one kid under your belt, you're well on your way to becoming a very successful homemaker.
Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.
Well, yes. But in the heroin case, "someone who's tried it once is likely to want to do more" doesn't prove that you are wickedly preventing people from self-actualizing by forbidding them from trying it the first time. In fact, quite the opposite - we recognize that getting hooked on a hard drug 'hijacks' people's preferences and gets in the way of their real wants and goals, so that allowing them to get exposed to the addictive substance is doing a disservice to their self-actualization! So, conceivably, pregnancy could be the same: a woman who tries it once might get 'hooked' and that's exactly why it's against a woman's better interests to have even a single child, lest she get addicted to the experience and let it ruin her life as she irrationally sinks all her time and resources into parenthood.
(I don't actually believe this, hence why it's an unserious gotcha.)
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